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Cognition and Emotion

Geoff was a policeman who had served on the streets for over ten years in that time he had won two commendations for bravery. Geoff was a popular guy, who was respected, trusted, and liked. He had a reputation as being the life and soul of the party. While on escort duty one day in the back of a police van, the prisoner whom Geoff was in charge of became extremely violent. He managed to throw Geoff against the side of the van and smashed Geoff's head out of the window before being overcome by...

Generalised anxiety problems involve excessive worry about several lifestyle domains such as health, finances, relationships, and so on. Such worrying usually takes up most of the individual's time and becomes highly disabling, both for the individuals concerned and for their partners, friends, and families. This so-called pathological worry is associated with a number of physiological somatic symptoms of fear or anxiety, although, for diagnostic purposes, it is not usually regarded as...

The focus of this book is primarily on normal emotions and their associated disorders. However, there are a number of appetitive and drive-related disorders that may be based, in part, on a particular drive becoming the focus of a disgust-based reaction either as a primary part of the disorder or as a secondary feature in which some other motive is primary. Two groups of disorders to which this approach may usefully be applied are the eating disorders and the sexual disorders. The role of...

In Chapter 2 we argued that the concept of emotion includes an event, a perception or interpretation, an appraisal, physiological change, a propensity for action, and conscious awareness. We further suggested that emotion as a paradigm case could also embrace overt behaviour. Within this conceptualisation we suggested that, in philosophical terms, it is only meaningful to distinguish one emotion from another on the basis of the appraisal component. That is to say, an emotion is specified as,...

For ease of explication, we have restricted the examples we have used in this chapter to basic emotions such as fear or anger. It is therefore useful to clarify the ways in which so-called complex emotions can be derived from the basic five (see also Chapter 3). We propose three routes to the generation of complex emotions within SPAARS 1 A coupling of two basic emotions for example, sadness and happiness can become coupled to generate the emotion of nostalgia. 2 Further appraisal cycles which...

David Clark's theoretical work on panic has been extremely influential, especially within the clinical domain, and any analysis of panic phenomena within SPAARS would have much in common with Clark's ideas. Enshrined within the SPAARS approach is the proposal (see Chapters 2 and 5) that emotions consist of an event, an interpretation, an appraisal, physiological arousal, an action potential, conscious awareness (and behaviour). We can see that these components are clearly delineated within...

One of the most heavily researched areas of bias in the emotional disorders has been the area of mnemonic biases in depression. For example, an influential study by Lloyd and Lishman (1975) reported that depressed patients were faster to recall unpleasant than pleasant memories in response to neutral cue words. In a cleverly designed application of this procedure, Clark and Teasdale (1982) tested a group of depressed patients who showed considerable diurnal variation in their mood, and found...

As we have discussed above, in definitional terms repressors do not differ from low-anxious participants on scores on anxiety measures (e.g., the Speilberger State Trait Anxiety Inventory Spielberger et al., 1970). This has clear implications for the research on information-processing biases and anxiety discussed in Chapter 6 on fear namely that the supposed low-anxious participants in those research studies, because they are selected on the basis of self-report questionnaire measures, are...

In line with our discussion of the components of emotion throughout the book, we see fear as comprising an event, an interpretation, an appraisal, physiological arousal, conscious awareness, and, in the paradigm case, overt behaviour (see Chapter 2). However, before considering some of these components in detail, it is important to review briefly other deconstructions of the fear response most notably the work of Peter Lang, which we have considered more fully in Chapter 3. Lang (e.g., 1977,...

In this final chapter on the basic emotions, we have made two important shifts in the focus of our theoretical analysis. The first is from the consideration of negative emotions to the consideration of positive ones the second is from an analysis of emotions related to the fate of specific goals to the consideration of an emotional state, which for the present purposes we have labelled Happiness, which reflects the goal status of the whole system. However, we do wish to emphasise, along with...

There exists a plethora of research findings concerning the covariation between measures of happiness on scales such as those described above and a variety of demographic and resource variables. This research is comprehensively reviewed by Argyle (2001) and Layard (2005). To overview briefly, age and education show only small correlations with subjective reports of happiness (Diener, 1984). It has been found that income is related to well-being, but that this relationship is only significant...

The putative relationship between depression and disgust has been dealt with in detail in Chapter 7. We argued for an analysis of depression in which the basic emotions of sadness and disgust may become coupled and thereby maintain the individual in a painful emotional state which may prove difficult to alter or regulate. Instead of covering the same ground again therefore, we will focus on the related problems of suicide and parasuicide. However, we will make a brief comment on the increasing...

Throughout this chapter we have conceptualised happiness as an emotional state that conflates across a number of different dimensions and levels of the cognitive system. We also noted at the start of the chapter that there is a host of other positive emotional states which seem much more specific than what we have called happiness for example joy, gladness, being pleased, satisfaction, delight, exhilaration, ecstasy, and so on. In addition, there are a number of quite complex emotional states...

Both Darwin (1872) and James (1884) have suggested that the experience of an emotion is at least partly a product of the facial changes that occur during an emotion episode. Modern counterparts of these ideas have been encapsulated in the facial feedback hypothesis (e.g., Laird, 1974 McIntosh, 1996). Winton (1986) identified two versions of the facial feedback hypothesis. In the categorical version, adopting the facial expression associated with a particular emotion enhances the experience of...

In relation to the more general SPAARS theory presented earlier in this chapter and in Chapter 5, we suggest that in depression-prone individuals there is a preoccupation with an overinvested role or goal. A major threat to or loss of this dominant role or goal leads the individual to focus on the aspects of the self-concept that are normally rejected and the lost role or goal that was central to self-worth (Champion &amp Power, 1995). This preoccupation with the lost role or goal leads to...

The research we have considered above on the affective and resource correlates of self-reported happiness has taken the participant's avowed happiness as a starting point and systematically investigated aspects of the individual's life which might be related to feeling happy. In contrast, gap theories are concerned with the processes that might underly self-reports of happiness that is, what determines whether individuals will report that they are happy. Such gap theories of happiness (e.g.,...

The findings from studies of cognitive biases in depressed and normal moods show that there are a number of effects. Perhaps the strongest evidence for bias in depression comes from work on explicit memory including word-list and autobiographical memory tasks. However, these studies emphasise that the clearest biases are obtained in the processing of self-related negative material rather than any negative material. The fact that findings for biases in implicit memory tasks have been less...

JOY AND OTHER CIRCUMSCRIBED POSITIVE THE REPRESSIVE COPING STYLE 337 EMOTIONAL STATES RELATED TO HAPPINESS 342 HAPPINESS ORDER AND HAPPINESS We hold these truths to be self-evident - that all men are created equal that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. (American Declaration of Independence) One of the puzzles of modern economics is that despite the genuine increase in the wealth of the developed...

In the introduction we noted several definitions of the broad emotional state of happiness. Although these attempts at definition capture some of the breadth of the concept of happiness, research into the nature of happiness has, for the most part, been conducted outside such definitional guidelines or theoretical frameworks. Such research has either tended to ask people what they feel makes them happy or has examined the correlates of happiness in people who claim to be happy (e.g., Veenhoven,...

Ed Diener and his colleagues have taken a somewhat different tack in the search for what makes people happy. They (e.g., Diener &amp Lucas, 1999 Diener, Sandvik, &amp Pavot, 1991 Diener et al., 1999) have proposed that self-reports of happiness are primarily a function of frequently experienced pleasant or positive affect and infrequently experienced unpleasant affect. In a number of studies they have shown that people who differ in their reports of happiness invariably differ in the amount of...

The concept of happiness disorder is one that is rarely discussed in the emotion literature. Perhaps it is because, in Western society, we are more tolerant of variations and extremes within the parameters, both cognitive and physiological, that define a particular individual's positive emotions, and are thus less likely to label the emotion as disordered in comparison to the case of extreme variants of negative emotions such as anger, fear, or sadness. In other non-Western cultures happiness...

In a number of chapters we have highlighted the roles that inhibition and facilitation play in the expression of emotion (see also Dalgleish et al., 1999). It was pointed out, for example, that many cultures have preferences for which of the basic emotions are permissible and which are not thus, the Ifaluk treat happiness as a negative emotion because it makes the sufferer blind to the needs of others and full of pride for the self (Lutz, 1988). As the bible also reminds us Pride goeth before...

Research shows that there is considerable agreement within a given society on what exactly the events, agents, interpretations, and appraisals that appropriately lead to anger might be (Averill, 1982 Ben-Zur &amp Breznitz, 1991 Russell &amp Fehr, 1994 Scherer &amp Wallbott, 1994). This agreement is far from being a trivial point, which is clear from an analysis of the homicide law in the United States (Averill, 1982 Oatley, 1992). To summarise, in the US legal system it is possible for a...

In Lang's (1979, 1984 Bradley &amp Lang, 2000) network approach, propositions are represented in the network through a combination of labelled nodes and links. Following Kintsch's (1974) suggestion that sentences can be represented as combinations of one or more propositions that take the form PREDICATE(ARGUMENT1, ARGUMENT2, . . .), nodes in a network are taken to represent arguments that are connected by links that are labelled with predicates thus, in the example shown in Figure 3.10, the...

Is that what love is really for, to lend us a new conception of ourselves It would be unforgiveable to write a book on the psychology of emotions without spending some time talking about perhaps the most compelling and sought-after emotional state of all. An excellent and entertaining review is provided by Frank Tallis's (2004) book Love Sick Love as a Mental Illness. Although we would disagree with Frank Tallis's fundamental thesis that love should be seen as a mental illness, in the same way...

We propose that the three domains of knowledge are represented across the various representational formats in similar ways. If we consider knowledge of the world as an example, we propose that abstract models of the world, such as the world as a safe place, would be represented at the schematic model level WORLD - SAFE PLACE . However, less abstracted information about the world, such as the fact that the chances of being mugged alone in Central Park at night are high, would be represented at...

Network theories follow in a long tradition that can be traced back to Aristotle and which includes the British empiricist or associationist school of philosophy. In psychology, associationism underpins not only behaviourism and the basis for the laws of learning, but also psychoanalysis and Freud's development of the free association technique. Indeed, one of the most detailed and elegant network models of autobiographical memory was presented by Breuer and Freud (1895). Because it bears close...

The next appraisal theory that we will consider is that of Oatley and Johnson-Laird (1987 see also Oatley, 1992, and Johnson-Laird &amp Oatley, 2000). Oatley and Johnson-Laird propose that in a system engaged in multiple goals and plans there have to be mechanisms by which priority can be assigned, because not all active goals and plans can be pursued at once. They argue that one of the important roles for emotion, therefore, is to provide a possible mechanism by which such priorities can be...

Other rarer affective disorders include the bipolar disorders and the seasonal affective disorders. Because of the important role of mania and hypomania in the diagnosis of bipolar disorders, we will hold the discussion of these until Chapter 10 when we discuss disorders of the basic emotion of happiness. The key paper on seasonal affective disorder (SAD) was by Rosenthal et al. (1984). Rosenthal and his colleagues described a seasonal pattern for a sample of 29 individuals in which there was a...

Mary was a 23-year-old woman with a family history of schizophrenia. At the age of 18, Mary suffered a bad viral complaint and one evening when she was feeling particularly under the weather, she started to become very anxious about her blocked throat, her headache, and her fuzzy thinking. The anxiety seemed to build and build until Mary went into a state where she felt unable to breathe and thought she was going to faint. When asked about it afterwards, Mary reported that she had been...

When given a choice, people are less likely to choose an operation if told they have a 7 chance of dying than if they are told that they have a 93 chance of survival (e.g., Sutherland, 1994). These and a whole range of similar observations have come to question the long-cherished belief of the rationality of the Western male at best it would seem that we can approximate to logic or rationality in our thinking, but there are a host of circumstances under which logic and rationality disappear in...

Mathews, Mogg, May, and Eysenck (1988) investigated explicit and implicit memory in groups of people with GAD, recovered anxious participants, and controls. The explicit memory task was a free recall paradigm and, in line with previous findings with GAD patients (e.g., Mogg, Mathews, &amp Weinman, 1987), there were no significant effects. The implicit memory paradigm was a word completion task. The participants were simply instructed to complete a word stem with the first word that came to...

The original 1975 theory was later reformulated by Abramson et al. (1978) an essentially equivalent reformulation was offered independently by Miller and Norman (1979), but, not surprisingly, credit for the reformulation has remained with the theory's originator. The important features of the reformulation are presented in Figure 4.1. In short, Abramson et al. added Weiner's attribution theory (see Chapter 3) to the original learned helplessness approach that is, although helplessness continued...

One of the important features of the SPAARS approach, with important therapeutic implications, is the centrality of the individual's roles and goals and the ways in which events are appraised in relation to these goals and plans. For example, the extent to which an individual will experience happiness, anger, depression, or whatever will, to a considerable degree, depend on the nature of that person's roles and goals, the extent to which roles and goals are achievable and realistic, the extent...

In Chapter 3 we reviewed associative network theories of emotion. We began with a discussion of Bower's theory (e.g., Bower, 1981 Bower &amp Forgas, 2000) in which emotions are represented by single nodes in a localised network. Having suggested numerous empirical and theoretical problems with this type of model (see Chapter 3 for a fuller discussion) we speculated on the advantages of a distributed network or parallel distributed processing architecture for the modelling of emotions (although...

We have proposed in the preceding two sections that the configuration of the SPAARS system is a function of the dominant schematic models and is maintained by a combination of facilitation and inhibition throughout the system. What is the interaction between these processes and emotion We have stressed throughout the book so far that emotions have functionality, and we have proposed a cognitive theory of emotions in the present chapter that employs the concept of roles and goals to provide a...

In Chapter 2 we reviewed the development of philosophical ideas about emotions. We finished the chapter by setting out a number of philosophical ground rules to which, we suggested, any theory of emotion must adhere if it is to make philosophical sense. These ground rules provide us with some of the main components of emotional experiences within a broadly functional theory of mind. What the rules do not do is to say very much about the psychological processes underlying emotional experience...

In Chapter 3 we stressed the importance of both conscious and unconscious systems in any understanding of emotion. Clearly it is beyond our ambitions to provide anything like a comprehensive discussion of consciousness and the problems it poses for psychology and philosophy. Instead, we shall restrict ourselves to a few necessarily inadequate remarks about the role and place of consciousness within SPAARS. In SPAARS the content of conscious awareness is a product of the various levels and...

It seems unlikely that it is possible to answer the question of how many emotions there are, or even whether it is meaningful to ask it. Some of the early philosophical analyses of emotion such as those of Aristotle and Descartes did present lists of emotions, but even here it is unclear whether they viewed these lists as illustrative or finite. Within cognitive theory the sensible approach would be that the number of emotions is determined by the number of states that fit the conceptual...

In this discussion of basic emotions we have tried to argue that the most profitable approach to the question of basicness is in terms of a core set of basic appraisal scenarios that emerge in most, if not all, human societies, and the emotions that incorporate these appraisal scenarios are the basic emotions. However, analysis of appraisal parameters is still very much a theoretical exercise, so it remains fruitful to examine the conclusions from other lines of investigation of basic emotions,...

In order to assess whether or not individuals are happy, researchers have devised a number of fairly straightforward self-report measures, although because of the wideranging nature of the concept it is not always happiness that these inventories purportedly measure. There now exist questionnaires that look at positive affect, subjective well-being, satisfaction with life, quality of life, and a number of other related constructs. Although there are clearly debates about the relationship of...

One of the distinctive characteristics of the SPAARS model is the fact that emotion can occur through either of two possible routes (see Figure 11.1 above see also Power &amp Dalgleish, 1999). The first route is one that is shared with other appraisal theories of emotion and has been sketched in the previous section. The second route, however, requires further comment, both in terms of its operation and in terms of its relationship to the interpretive-appraisal route. The need for two routes to...

As we noted at the beginning of the chapter, there is a considerable folk-psychological consensus about which mental states are the emotions, e.g., fear, anger, guilt, and so on. Likewise, there is general agreement that hunger, pain, itches, etc. are not emotions. The challenge for any model of emotion, we suggested, is to produce a conceptual framework from which these accepted distinctions between emotions and non-emotions emerge. The most difficult of these distinctions is that between...

Mandler (e.g., 1984) has developed a theory over a number of years that bears many similarities to Schachter and Singer's proposals while presenting a more complex role for cognitive processes. In Mandler's theory, physiological arousal is considered to arise from perceived discrepancy or from the interruption to an ongoing goal or plan. The arousal is seen as an undifferentiated physiological state that underlies both positive and negative emotions cognition determines which emotion is...

Following the outline general model presented in Chapter 5 of the SPAARS approach to emotion, we will now consider the application of the model to sadness. The focus will initially be on all forms of sadness, but in subsequent sections we will examine how the model applies to the extreme forms of sadness seen in grief, and to the sadness-based disorder of depression. Three of the key points that we proposed in Chapter 5 were that basic emotions have the potential to develop in a modular...

The debate between proponents of analogical and propositional mental representations is one of the oldest in cognitive psychology. Theoreticians such as Paivio (see Paivio, 1971, 1986) have argued that both forms of representation are essential to any understanding of human cognition. In contrast, psychologists such as Pylyshyn (e.g., 1973, 1984) have proposed that all mental knowledge can be represented in propositional terms. What then do we mean by the terms analogical and propositional The...

The most influential network theory of emotion was proposed by Gordon Bower (Bower, 1981, 1992 Bower &amp Cohen, 1982 Bower &amp Forgas, 2000). Based on the earlier Anderson and Bower (1973) Human Associative Memory (HAM) model, Bower proposed that concepts, events, and emotions can all be represented as nodes within a network. In fact, the type of network originally chosen by Anderson and Bower consisted only of labelled links the nodes themselves had no semantic labels. However, for ease of...

The basic proposal of the Schachter and Singer (1962) theory was that emotion involved the cognitive interpretation of a state of bodily arousal (see Figure 3.12). This state of arousal was considered to be a general one, in that the same arousal underpinned both positive and negative emotions the crucial determinant for the type of emotion experienced was how the individual explained the state of arousal. To quote from Schachter and Singer Precisely the same state of physiological arousal...

Fear and anxiety can become disordered in a variety of ways. We can experience excessive fear to relatively harmless objects or we can develop beliefs that certain things are threatening or harmful when they are not. In other situations fear or anxiety can seem appropriate but overgeneralised such as in post-traumatic reactions or chronic worry. The challenge for any theory that seeks to explain both fear order and fear disorder is to account for the varieties of abnormal fear without making...

The next significant emergence of the cognitive stream was provided by the Dutch-born philosopher Baruch Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677) in The Ethics (1677 1955). Scruton warns Spinoza's greatness and originality are hidden behind a remote, impassive, and often impenetrable style. Few have understood his arguments in their entirety. This seems to apply particularly to Spinoza's writing on emotions. He sets out in The Ethics to provide derivations from first principles of the essential properties...

A number of earlier studies of judgement in depression showed that although depressed individuals were clearly more negative than their non-depressed counterparts (e.g., DeMonbreun &amp Craighead, 1977), nevertheless they were often found to be more realistic or accurate on such tasks (Lewinsohn, Mischel, Chaplin, &amp Barton, 1980). The classic statement of this position was by Alloy and Abramson (1979) who, from a series of judgement of contingency studies with depressed and normal students,...

Although we introduced the idea of functionalism in our discussion of the work of Aristotle, we have given the question of why we have emotions little consideration. To recapitulate, the Aristotelian reply to the question, why do we have emotions is that the function of emotions is related to the propensity they allow for certain types of behaviour (cf. Dennett, 1991). So, the function of fear is to provide a propensity for Susan to run away from the bear. One might even add that the...

Despite the difficulties with feeling theory, it can rank among its proponents some of the greatest names in Western philosophy. John Locke's description of pain and pleasure and the emotions they give rise to is thoroughly Cartesian, though less fully articulated. He states that pain and pleasure cannot be described, nor their names defined the way of knowing them is, as of the simple ideas of the senses, only by experience (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding II, 20 see Kenny, 1963, for a...

The complex emotions of guilt, shame, and embarrassment are part of the group known as self-conscious emotions (e.g., Lewis, 1993) in that they require an internal evaluation of the self against a set of rules, standards, or goals and in which the self or some aspect of the self is seen to have failed (see Figure 9.2). There is now agreement that guilt refers in particular to specific aspects or acts which fall short of some standard, whereas in shame it is the self rather than some specific...

The obsessive-compulsive disorders (OCDs) have long been derived from anxiety in the main classification systems. This tradition follows in part the early analysis of OCD and other disorders by Freud who proposed, among many other things, that consciously experienced anxiety is a consequence of the transformation of repressed libido (e.g., Breuer &amp Freud, 1895). Thus, the most recent American (DSM-IV) and World Health Organization (ICD-10) classification systems both include obsessive-...

The threads of various strands for current social-cognitive theories of depression can be seen first in the work on the vulnerability that arises for an individual who overinvests in one particular role (Becker, 1971) or goal (Arieti &amp Bemporad, 1978) and second in the work on life events and depression carried out by Brown and Harris (1978), in which a number of social vulnerability factors were highlighted because of their interaction with adversity to increase an individual's likelihood...

CONSIDERATIONS 226 COMBINATIONS OF SADNESS AND OTHER FURTHER COMMENTS AND CONCLUSIONS 256 When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions. Sadness is little studied in psychology. This failure is surprising given its widespread portrayal in art, the cinema, music, and literature. Instead, the more extreme variants of sadness such as grief, bereavement, and mourning, or disorders derived from sadness such as depression have dominated psychological study (cf. Barr-Zisowitz,...

It is important to elaborate on the types of models of self, world, and others which we propose that the individual holds at the schematic model level of meaning within SPAARS, and how they relate to the individual's prior emotional and developmental history, in order to try to understand the enormous range of individual differences in the way people respond to traumatic events. Dalgleish (2004) has proposed that there are five main types of pre-trauma personalities that interact with the...

A number of the problems with the reformulated learned helplessness theory have led at least some of its proponents to offer a second reformulation which they have called hopelessness theory (Abramson et al., 1988, 1989). Both in terms of name and in terms of content, hopelessness theory has been placed squarely within the framework of Beck's cognitive therapy. Because we will deal with Beck's approach in the next section, the coverage of hopelessness theory will be brief and will focus on the...

To review the conceptualisation of fear within the SPAARS framework it might be useful to consider a new example after all, Susan has been running from the bear for so long now that she is almost certainly exhausted. Let us consider a common example from the cognitive therapy literature (e.g., Beck et al., 1979). Imagine the event of a loud noise in your house (in which you are alone) in the middle of the night. There are a number of interpretations of such an event for example, one might...

Novaco's (e.g. 1975, 1979) model of anger is the most influential in the clinical context and has recently been adapted for working with anger problems in people with intellectual disabilities (Taylor &amp Novaco, 2005). A schematic flow diagram of Novaco's formulation is presented in Figure 8.3. In Novaco's model, external events are cognitively processed and may lead to a state of emotional arousal. This arousal is a general physiological response, which may be labelled differently by the...

We have already touched on some characteristics of the cognitive approach to emotion in our initial remarks on Aristotle and his current functionalist influence on philosophy and psychology. However, before launching into detailed accounts of cognitive models of emotion and the emotional disorders, it is first necessary to provide some groundwork about the cognitive approach and what we see as its most useful characteristics. As with any approach, there are a number of distinct churches...

Barbara Fredrickson (1998, 2001) has proposed the so-called broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. The broaden component of the theory refers to the current function of positive emotions whereas negative emotions are considered to restrict the available thought-action repertoires and increase the likelihood of specific action tendencies, positive emotions are considered to do the opposite. That is, positive emotions are considered to broaden the range of available thought-action...

The evidence clearly shows that emotion responses can be learned and activated without benefit of neocortex and thought processes . . . This makes them difficult to access and treat through interventions that are strictly cognitive in nature. Emotions acquired through subcortical pathways are difficult to extinguish by any technique. (Izard, 1994, p. 151) In Izard's further advice to himself and other would-be therapists, he points to the danger of assuming that there is only one route to...

In order to provide a guiding framework we will now offer a menu, with comments, of what is to be found in the remaining chapters in this book. This menu will, we hope, provide sufficient information for some selection of the dishes that individual readers might prefer to spend longer over, in addition to those that they might prefer to avoid or merely taste and pass quickly on to the next course. The book is divided into two main parts Part 1 is mainly theoretical and reviews a range of...

SELIGMAN'S LEARNED HELPLESSNESS THEORY 103 In the vast colony of our being there are many different kinds of people, all thinking and feeling differently. The cognitive theories presented in Chapter 3 took normal emotions as their starting point. However, there are a number of influential cognitive approaches to emotion that have taken their starting points to be disorders of emotion rather than normal emotions themselves. These theories will form the focus of the present chapter. In contrast...

Interpretation biases in anxiety were investigated by Eysenck, Mogg, May, Richards, and Mathews (1991). They presented people with GAD, recovered anxious people, and control participants with a series of sentences. Some of the sentences were ambiguous, with both threatening and non-threatening interpretations (e.g., The two men watched as the chest was opened.). After presentation of the sentences, the participants were given an unexpected recognition memory test, in which they had to decide...

SUMMARY OF THE SPAARS MODEL META-EMOTIONAL SKILLS AND REPRESENTATIONS THERAPEUTIC IMPLICATIONS FINAL COMMENTS ON SPAARS You miss 100 of the shots you never take. As in ice-hockey, so in real life. We have taken shots at most things throughout the previous chapters in this book on the principle that if you don't shoot you'll never hit the target, but at the same time we are mindful that many of the shots will inevitably miss. The aims of this final chapter are therefore to draw together the key...

Therapists (e.g., Clark, 1986 Teasdale, 1983, 1999) have argued for a circular relationship between cognition and emotion rather than a simple linear one we will examine Clark's approach to panic in more detail in the next section and in Chapter 6. There are two main components to the theory from which the general therapeutic approach is derived (see Figure 4.3). The first of these focuses on the types of cognitive structures that underlie the emotional disorders and the second focuses on the...

In this final section we would like to replay some of the edited highlights from the theories presented in this chapter. These points, along with those from Chapters 2 and 4, will then be carried forward to Chapter 5 where we will attempt an integration of current theories. Each theory that we have examined, like all theories, has both strengths and weaknesses. Even some of the earlier theories that many now consider to be incorrect were influential enough to spawn empirical research that...

The first thing I would do if I were returning to teaching and practising psychotherapy is remind myself that the modularity of emotions is central to understanding and treating a number of human problems. The principle of modularity means that each emotion exists as a relatively independent and dissociable module with powers for organising and motivating specific sorts of cognition and action. (Izard, 1994, p. 149, author's own italics) Izard's advice to himself is completely in tune with the...

As we have stated above, for the purposes of the present chapter, whether or not an individual is happy conflates across many goals in different domains and at different levels of the system. In the domain of positive emotion, experiences such as joy or exhilaration are responses to the achievement of or movement towards active goals and are more akin to the states of anger, fear, sadness, and disgust. We are not presenting anything new here this understanding of happiness has been around for...

Mrs Evans had been diagnosed by the junior psychiatrist as suffering from mania. She had been brought into the emergency referral clinic by her son who had come home to find her sitting in the living room surrounded by new, expensive commodities she had purchased with her cheque book, even though there was not enough money in the bank to cover the outgoings. Mrs Evans was extremely happy about her new acquisitions but, when her son pointed out that she had done something wrong, she very quickly...

The attribution theory of emotion presented by Weiner (e.g., 1985, 1986) provides one of the transitional theories between the earlier undifferentiated arousal approaches and some of the more recent appraisal approaches that posit two or more differentiated states that are characteristic of emotions. For example, in relation to the Zajonc-initiated debate about the primacy of affect, Weiner sits on the fence It is entirely possible that in some instances feelings antedate causal thoughts. For...

So far the discussion of cognitive therapy has been dominated by reference to depression, but in order to illustrate how the approach can be modified and applied to other emotional disorders we will briefly mention David Clark's (1986) cognitive model of panic, which will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 6. The key theme in both Beck's general approach to anxiety (Beck &amp Emery, 1985) and in Clark's (1986) application of the approach to panic disorder is that the individual is...

In 1987 Howard Leventhal and Klaus Scherer combined forces and produced a joint cognitive theory of emotion based on their previously separate ideas. Leventhal and Scherer argue that the operation of cognition and emotion is one of interdependence. They distinguish between emotion and other reflex-like responses, because although reflexes may play important roles as elements of emotional reactions Emotional processes decouple automatic, reflex responses from their eliciting stimuli and provide...

One of the possibilities that we suggested in Chapter 5 was that two or more basic emotions could, under certain circumstances, continuously activate each other. This coupling between emotion modules can be considered to work in a similar way to the within-module activation that was outlined in the previous section. The proposal does of course run counter to a number of emotion theories such as that of Oatley and Johnson-Laird (1987), in which it was argued that complex emotions were derived...

A number of psychological paradigms provide frameworks for understanding PTSD, for example psychodynamic (e.g., Freud, 1919), learning theory (e.g., Keane, Zimmering, &amp Caddell, 1985), and cognitive (e.g., Horowitz, 1986). While all of these paradigms encompass theories that offer interesting insights into the nature of the disorder, it is the cognitive approach that we feel is the most fully developed and offers the greatest explanatory and predictive power. Cognitive theories of PTSD have...

In this section we shall consider how the SPAARS model of emotion accounts for the processing of trauma-related information at the time of the traumatic event and also how that information and the individual's reactions to it are processed subsequent to the traumatic event. The SPAARS approach to PTSD has been spelled out in considerable detail elsewhere (Dalgleish, 1999, 2004a Dalgleish &amp Power, 2004b), so only a summary of the approach is presented here. At the time of the trauma, we...

Brewin et al. (1996) have applied Brewin's (1989) dual representation theory (DRT) to post-traumatic stress reactions in general and to PTSD in particular. This approach endeavours to circumvent some of the difficulties of single-level theories discussed above by proposing two levels in memory at which trauma-related information can be represented. The first level of representation is of the individual's conscious experience of the traumatic event. This forms what Brewin et al. have called...

A cognitive-therapy-based model of PTSD has been presented by Ehlers and Clark (2000). The main core of the theory is centred on the proposal that there is a cyclical process that maintains a current and continuing sense of threat, analogous to the cycle that leads to panic in Clark's (1986) model of panic presented earlier in the chapter. The sense of threat is based on the past traumatic event, the nature of the trauma memory, and the negative appraisal of the trauma and its consequences. The...

In more recent work, Berkowitz (1990, 1999) has taken the themes that run through his theoretical writings on anger in the 1960s and provided a new framework for understanding anger episodes. This neo-associationist model of anger is represented schematically in Figure 8.2. As can be seen from the figure, Berkowitz's reformulation begins with what he describes as an aversive event. This term is all-encompassing it includes people who feel bad because they have a toothache, are very hot, are...

The main cognitive models of depression were presented earlier in Chapter 4 because Seligman's learned helplessness and Beck's cognitive therapy models have also been applied to other psychological disorders. Rather than repeat these presentations, therefore, we will simply highlight some of the conclusions that we reached. First, there is no convincing evidence that attributional style is a vulnerability factor for the onset of depression, whatever its role in maintenance and recovery might be...

Interoception is the perception of bodily cues, and Shands and Schor (1982) have suggested that panic patients are interoceptive experts, being able to describe significant changes in almost every organ system and region of the body (p. 108). This issue has been investigated in a series of studies by Ehlers and her colleagues. In the first two studies, Ehlers, Margraf, Davies, and Roth (1988) and Ehlers, Margraf, Roth, Taylor, and Birbaumer (1988) did not find that panic disorder patients were...

The Schematic Propositional Analogical Associative Representation Systems (SPAARS) model of emotion that has been presented throughout this book is summarised in Figure 11.1. The model is multi-level and includes four different types of representation. The initial processing of stimuli occurs through a number of mode-specific or sensory-specific systems such as the visual, the auditory, the tactile, the propriocep-tive, and the olfactory that we have grouped together as the analogical...

Skinner (e.g., Holland &amp Skinner, 1961 Skinner, 1974) offers us another variety of behaviourist theories of emotions. Skinner discusses emotions within an operant conditioning framework. Within this model emotions serve to put the organism into states in which different sets of event contingencies define the reinforcers Under different emotional conditions, different events serve as reinforcers, and different groups of operants increase in probability of emission. By these predispositions we...

The cognitive appraisal model of Janoff-Bulman (1992 Janoff-Bulman &amp Frantz, 1997) focuses almost exclusively on the nature of the pre-existing beliefs about the world that the individual carries into a traumatic situation. Janoff-Bulman argues that PTSD is the result of certain basic assumptions about the world being shattered, as reflected in the title of her book which outlines the approach in detail Shattered Assumptions Towards a New Psychology of Trauma. The assumptions that...

Clark's elegantly simple model of panic owes much to the ideas of Beck (e.g., 1976) which are discussed in detail in Chapter 4. According to Clark's (1986, 1996) model of panic catastrophic misinterpretations of certain bodily sensations (1986, p. 461) are a necessary condition for the production of a panic attack. Thus, a panic attack may originate from the misinterpretation that an increase in heart rate is a signal for an impending heart attack, or that the onset of feeling slightly dizzy or...

The interacting cognitive subsystems (ICS) approach (Barnard, 1985, 2003 Barnard &amp Teasdale, 1991 Teasdale &amp Barnard, 1993) is a recent exemplar of one of a class of multi-level, multi-system approaches (see also Leventhal and Scherer's model in Chapter 3) that, in addition to their potential application to emotion, can provide accounts of a wide variety of cognitive skills and processes (cf. Newell, 1990). As we shall see therefore, the link between cognition and emotion is not easily...

The three theoreticians, Borkovec, Metzger, and Pruzinsky (1986), combined to propose a tripartite theory of worry and anxiety. The three tiers reflect their three predominant areas of interest learning theory, cognitive psychology, and self-theory. However, the foundation of the model is Borkovec's work on learning theory and we shall concentrate on that in our brief review of this approach. Borkovec et al. (1986 Borkovec &amp Miranda, 1999), inspired by Mowrer's (1947) two-stage theory of...

We will begin with a brief discussion of Lazarus' (1966) early theory before going on to consider his more recent revisions (Lazarus, 1991). In the influential 1966 version, emotion was considered to arise from how individuals construed or appraised their ongoing transactions with the world. Cognitive appraisal was considered to occur in two stages. Primary appraisal refers to an initial evaluation of whether an encounter is irrelevant, benign, positive, or stressful thus, the conclusion that...

It has long been the tradition to derive the anxiety disorders from the basic emotion of fear (see Chapter 6) and, of course, we do not dispute that many fears and phobias have their origins in fear-based responses. However, there are a number of early-onset specific phobias that do not conform to the original Mowrer (e.g., 1939) two-factor theory of phobias, as Rachman has argued for many years (see Rachman, 2004, for a recent summary). In an attempt to deal with some of these problems,...

Hatfield and Rapson have defined passionate love as follows a state of intense longing for union with another. Reciprocated love (union with the other) is associated with fulfilment and ecstacy. Unrequited love (separation) is associated with emptiness, anxiety, or despair. Passionate love is a complex functional whole including appraisals or appreciations, subjective feelings, expressions, patterned physiological processes, action tendencies, and instrumental behaviours. (1993, p. 5) It is...

The network theories of Bower (see Chapter 3) and the schema theory of Beck (see above) predicted that a wide range of cognitive biases should be found in emotional disorders such as anxiety and depression. The failure to find such global biases prompted Williams et al. (1988, 1997) to propose an empirically based model in which cognitive biases were specific to specific emotional disorders. Williams et al. (1988, 1997) took as their theoretical starting point the distinction made by Graf and...

A further example of the associative generation of anger within SPAARS is when anger-related appraisals of an event at some time in the emotional history of the individual, through a process of repetition of that event (see Chapter 5), become associatively driven such that eventually there is no longer a need for access to the schematic model level of meaning for the emotion of anger to be generated following that event. The recent approach to anger developed by DiGiuseppe and Tafrate (2007)...

The publication of the book Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman in 1995 led to the sudden popularisation of the earlier proposal for the concept of emotional intelligence by Salovey and Mayer (1990), which in turn was based on earlier proposals such as Gardner's (1983) concept of social intelligence. The popularisation has led to the assessment and teaching of emotional skills in the workplace and in schools, while academically it has remained surrounded by controversy. The main arguments...